58 My personal war against three words
In my last few years of as a Professor, I taught a graduate seminar on writing scientific papers {sec-writing}. I always included discussion on style. I had grown up with Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, and I shared that classic book with students. I also introduced them to J. M. Williams’ Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, and (for completeness) told them about Geoffey K. Pullum, who unabashedly claimed that
“…the success of Elements [of Style]* was one of the worst things to have happened to English language education in America in the past century*.”
Style can be contentious!
In addition, I’d always discussed the use and misuse of three words: “it,” “there,” and “using.” These words are popular. In fact, they were the 17th, 64th, and 240th (respectively) most commonly used words in English-language websites on Google. Nevertheless, I often criticized this overused trinity in my writing class and in scores of manuscript reviews, Here are some made-up but egregious examples.
“Using radio telemetry, the body temperatures of lizards were monitored in September 2022.”
The syntactical blunder here is that body temperatures weren’t using radio telemetry. Science writers (especially in Methods sections of papers) use such passive construction in an attempt to sound objective. Here are two alternative versions:
“Using radio telemetry, we measured the body temperatures of lizards.” Or “We used radio telemetry to measure the body temperatures of lizards”.
Lesson: do a global search on “using” and check the syntax.
A problem with “it” is that “it” can have ambiguous meaning. “It” often has two different meanings in the same sentence. Consider: “It seems that it was a hot year.” The first “it” is a “meaningless dummy” or non-specific word, whereas the second it” refers to a specific year.
Results sections of scientific papers often have sentences of this general form:
“There is a correlation between evaporation and ambient temperature.
This sentence is grammatically correct and clear but is (for me) a poor sentence. Why? Ray’s Rule Number One: Make the subject of the sentence the subject of the sentence.
OK, that Rule sounds silly as written, but note that the example above draws the reader’s attention to a non-specific and unnecessary word, “there.” Why not delete “there is,” select a noun as the subject, and create a concise sentence?
“Using” Rule Number One, I can rewrite the above sentence in several ways, “Evaporation is correlated with ambient temperature.” “Ambient temperature is correlated with evaporation.” “A correlation exists between ambient temperature and evaporation.” My choice among these options would depend on the context. For example, if my paper is about evaporation, I would use evaporation as the subject.
Let’s go back to “it.” Although “it” is common and functional, I sometimes wonder that scientific writing would not suffer much if it” were banished. However, The Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (by Bergan Evans and Cornelia Evans) delightfully and entertainingly defends most usages of it.” [Evans and Evans were, however, more critical of some uses of “there.”]
For fun, I sometimes look for examples from English literature where there or it” has been used and attempt to rewrite and streamline sentences.
Consider the opening sentence of Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens – a book I read first in 10th grade.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
In a single sentence, Dickens used it 10 times and its once. To uphold the honor of Ray’s Rule Number One, I felt obliged to rewrite this sentence by substituting nouns as subjects.
“That time was the best time ever, and the worst time ever, and…”
No, that doesn’t work.
“No time was better, no time was worse, no time had more wisdom…”
No, that doesn’t work either.
My take-home lesson: Dickens wrote a perfect sentence. Sometimes it’s OK to use it.
What about there? Here, the classic quote is from Gertrude Stein: >
“…there’s no there there.”
Although many people misinterpreted here statement as a slam on Oakland, California, “it” was her response upon learning that her childhood home in Oakland had been razed. In any case, look at her word choice. She used there for three out of four words (or three out of five, depending one considers a contraction to be two words).
I’m not a grammarian, but for me, Stein and Dickens wrote perfect sentences, even if their sentences violate Ray’s Rules of Writing. Both sentences make their points. Whether someone could improve either sentence seems doubtful.
There must be a stylistic lesson there, but it seems probable that it has evaded me.